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Gyroscope Gives CellPhones 'Tilt Control'

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the innovation-in-user-interface dept.

Paul Stamatiou writes "You can now control cellphone activities by simply tilting it. "If you have a game involving keeping a car on the road, you do that by tilting," says company spokesman Jan Ahrenbring. The tilting technique can also be used to sweep large virtual pages across the phone's screen, which acts as window on the information."

4 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. What I really want.... by Crash42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    is a $20 phone with a 200 hours batterylife for making phonecalls. I don't want a $2000 mp3 playing, fm radio, camera, tilt controlled gamecosole, pda, alarmclock thingy wich btw can also be used (if you ever might want to) to make phonecalls...

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    ....Excuse me, but ... ah, forget it...
  2. Tilting pie menus by SimHacker · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Here's a cool research paper from Sony's Computer Science Labs, about "tilting pie menus". I love it! I can't wait till all cell phones can sense tilt. Tilt control rocks!

    Tilting Operations for Small Screen Interfaces (Tech Note)
    By Jun Rekimoto, Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Inc. www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/papers/uist96.p df

    HTML version from google:

    http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:xf0Rxikgk34J: www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/papers/uist96.p df+tilt+pie+menu&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

    -Don

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    Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
  3. Mercury switch vs Gyroscope? by Koos+Baster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    IMHO even a very small gyroscope seems pretty impractical wrt. (innertial) forces, size and battery life. How about simply using mercury switches to measure/estimate the cell phone's position?

  4. Why a gyroscope? by pesc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Most modern phones have a camera. Why not just activate it and perform some image processing. Now you can determine how you tilt the phone just by looking through the camera.

    Another nifty thing you could do; if the camera is on the back-side of your phone, you should be able to activate it and use the phone as an optical mouse. Just slide the phone on your desk, and the mouse pointer on the phone screen moves. Cute eh?

    Maybe I should patent this and get rich?
    But now I have already written about it on slashdot. Too late. Damned slashdot, hindering innovation like this!

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    )9TSS